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Khulood Al Mu’alla is a poet from the UAE. Born in Umm Al Quwain, she moved to Ras Al Khaimah in her childhood and completed her education there before attending UAE University for her Bachelor’s degree in Architecture. She went on to obtain a Master’s degree in Project Management from Reading University in the UK, and a Bachelor’s degree in Arabic Language from Beirut University. She currently resides in Dubai, where she works for a well-known international telecommunications company.

Khulood has to date published four volumes of poetry. Her first, Here, I Lost the Time (1997) was written while she was living in the UK. While living in Sharjah she wrote her second, You, Alone (1999); her third and fourth, Ha’ of the Absent* (2003) and Perhaps Here (2008), were written while she was living in Abu Dhabi. Her poems are founded on a desire to change the world through Sufism, and are influenced by her scientific outlook.

Critics have received her work favourably, saying “when poetry and science combine together, the reader finds himself in front of severely summarised and intensified texts. It touches the spirit, takes it high to beautiful horizons and leaves it in harmony with itself and more capable of discovering the hidden meanings of the life and its details.” Her poems are “founded on a desire to challenge the world through a Sufi insight in which she discovers transparently herself, life and the universe” and that Khulood “leaves the soul on the edges of the poem”.

In 2008, Khulood won the Buland Al Haidari Award for Young Arab Poets at the 30th Aseela International Cultural Festival in Morocco, an event that celebrates visionary poets and intellectuals from the Arab World. She was the first poet from the Gulf to win this award. She maintains a prominent presence in the Gulf poetry scene, participating in cultural events and having her work published in Arabic newspapers and magazines.

She is now beginning to receive international recognition as well, with a selection of poems from her four books translated into Spanish and due to be published soon.

*Ha’a is a pronoun used in Arabic to talk about somebody who is absent.